AI Diagnosis Tool Bridges The Gap Between Doctors And Patients

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AI tools are bringing healthcare to the customer, and reducing doctors' workloads in the process

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The healthcare sector is facing a host of severe problems that do not have one overarching solution. Globally there is a shortage of 7.2 million healthcare workers, and a rapidly aging population will only add more strain to the doctors that remain. New technology powered by AI could provide the relief that physicians need, but there are many obstacles in implementing new technology, and radical systemic change may not help healthcare improve in the short term.

The AI healthcare market is expected to reach nearly $20B by 2024, and the big four tech companies have made clear their plans to take their own slice of the pie - but without the right approach, AI and emerging tech may just give doctors more to think about. With so much business potential at stake, and such a complex operational landscape to navigate, will emerging technologies alleviate the burden on doctors, or simply cause more problems?

Bringing medicine to the edge

Anyone thinking of introducing technology into the healthcare sector has to conform with strict regulations around patient information and physician practices, and navigate some of the largest obstacles to entry of any industry. Hospitals are incredibly bureaucratic places that make it difficult for any decision to be made without spending hours on patient administration. This bureaucracy, coupled with a lack of doctors and high instances of burnout, means that learning an entirely new technology-enabled system is not feasible for doctors. ‘You have an enormous cultural shift in behavior that has to happen,’ says Art Papier, CEO of VisualDx an AI diagnostic system, ‘it’s not going to happen overnight.’

As a way of bringing AI into the healthcare sphere without interrupting physicians, companies are bringing healthcare closer to the customer, with a huge increase in health apps over recent years promoting a healthy lifestyle. Increasing focus on healthy living and preventative care through technology could allow physicians to interact more frequently with patients remotely, and provide more actionable information before a patient even enters the hospital. Reducing the number of people that are referred to hospital in the first place, thereby reducing the workload of medical specialists, could also avoid serious problems of overtreatment and medical errors that are rife in the US.

More power to primary care

VisualDx aims to tackle the problems in the healthcare sector on both fronts, by reducing the workload of doctors both inside and outside the hospital. The tool aims to assist primary physicians by identifying rare diseases or unusual variations of common diseases as early as possible, by analyzing images of skin-presenting symptoms. ‘Diagnosis is a process of inching ourselves to a more secure position, it’s very different from knowing answers,’ says CEO Art Papier. But given that ‘the hardest area for primary care workers is skin-presenting diseases,’ allowing first-contact doctors to identify diseases during the early stages of treatment could lead to more accurate diagnoses, minimize referrals to specialists, and save time and money further down the line.

Aside from putting the power of AI into the hands of primary physicians, the company’s new consumer-facing app Aysa could help patients to identify diseases themselves (or give them peace of mind) before seeing a doctor. Leveraging the power of Apple’s CoreML software suite (which earned VisualDx a nod from Tim Cook), users can take a picture of a rash or any other skin-presenting symptom, and ‘receive guidance based on Machine Learning (ML) and the existing clinical knowledge base’ straight from their phone. Papier notes that this is no substitute for a medical professional: ‘you could have a rash from penicillin or from mononucleosis, as a doctor you have to know the difference and the context,’ but could dramatically reduce actual appointment and treatment times by sharing the load between doctors and consumers. Of course, this could also increase precautionary visits, whereby patients mistakenly think they have a rare disease that the system has flagged as a possibility - but that is why medical professionals must remain in the loop.

While VisualDx started as a way to augment primary care workers and take the strain off overworked physicians, bringing their application into the consumer sphere may also help to consolidate the sluggish digitization of the healthcare sector. ‘You need standards to interchange between silos of consumer health info and professional tools,’ says Papier, and now VisualDx can use 20 years worth of metadata to build a knowledge base for professionals and consumers alike. ‘It’s all part of the same database, so as we move forward the data that people add on their phone could be immediately included in the physician’s experience.’

Two-pronged approach

Bridging the divide between highly detailed user data and actual healthcare professionals could save doctors time when treating patients and also reduce the number of patients seeking treatment for routine, over-the-counter maladies. Major tech companies may well be looking to stake their claim on the market and change huge areas of healthcare in one fell swoop, but real-world benefits will always trump radical change in an environment as chaotic as healthcare.

Instead of pursuing a complete AI overhaul, giving doctors tools to more effectively treat their patients and helping patients understand their symptoms, might be all the healthcare industry needs. As Art Papier states, ‘the promise of AI is to bring those questions to the patient sooner, so that a more thorough history is delivered to the physician.’

Charles Towers-Clark is Group CEO of Pod Group, an IoT connectivity & billing software provider. His book ‘The WEIRD CEO’ covers AI & the future of work. Follow him @ctowersclark